Global population: history, geopolitics, and life on earth

Introduction: Life and earth -- Confined in room : a spatial history of malthusianism -- War and peace : population, territory, and living space -- Density : universes with definite limits -- Migration : world population and the global color line -- Waste lands : sovereignty and the anticolonial history of world population -- Life on earth : ecology and the cosmo-politics of population -- Soil and food : agriculture and the fertility of the earth -- Sex : the geopolitics of birth control -- The species : human difference and global eugenics -- Food and freedom : a new world of plenty? -- Life and death : the biopolitical solution to a geopolitical problem -- Universal rights? Population control and the powers of reproductive freedom -- Conclusion: Population in the space age

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the Baby Boomers. Overpopulation as a conceptual problem originated after World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. This study traces the idea of a world population problem as it developed from the 1920s through the 1950s, long before the late-1960s notion of a postwar ?population bomb." Drawing on international conference transcripts, the volume reconstructs the twentieth-century discourse on population as an international issue concerned wi